musashibo wrote:While Stenahldi's claims that you can play feral to the highest ability w/stock UI are a bit ridiculous**,

Huh? I don't believe I've ever made that claim. Of the many deficiencies of the stock UI, I consider it unplayable for just about any class for the simple reason that the most important UI elements are all spread on opposite corners of the screen: cooldowns on bottom, resources on top left, buffs on top right.

Maybe I misread it, but:

Feral can be played to it's maximum on default UI by a very skilled player, it's just plain untrue to say that feral requires addons to play.

Zstriker wrote:

musashibo wrote:
** You'd have to be rainman to track dancing steel, 2 trinkets, DoC charges, OOC procs and their icds while calculating and remembering the values of applied rip/rake/thrash compared to if-cast-now rip/rake/thrash. Addons are pretty much a necessity for that (Stenhaldi's own weakauras script in particular)
To say nothing of how ridiculous it is to stare at the top right of the screen just to track our normal buffs/debuffs (SR,rake,thrash,rip,weakened armor) and the bottom center/left to track our cds (TF,Berserk,FF,barkskin,SI,symbiosis)
This isn't particular issue to feral though, as I find the default UI to be pretty much unplayable for all but the most faceroll specs/classes.

all I have is debuff tracker rip/rake/SV (3 small icon) addon putted between standart UI elements and middle of screen where my view is concentrated during encounters, thats all, rest is done by your mind and fingers, after 4.2 those icons now come with numbers for snapshotting

no need anything else to play feral high rated at top, like all those crazy kinky addon lovers claims, oh you noob you play with blizzard ui, etc...all other stuff is PERSONAL preferences

I think this is getting into strawman territory. The contention was about a pure stock UI... I agree all that's needed is 1 addon to consolidate some visuals in more visible areas and numbers to help snapshot values. Though it's not clear to me if you're referring to the tooltip numbers -- which would be very useful if not for the fact that I have to hover over them. Nor am I aware of a way to pull those numbers out to display w/a simpler addon (granted I've only tried the "value1/value2/value3" of UnitDebuff). Most snapshotting addons or WA scripts seem to rely on monitoring combat events and calculating the "would be" values independently after pulling character stats.

I don't know which page I posted it on but I'm pretty sure that's my quote. Perhaps I didn't state my argument as eloquently as I would've liked, but my point was that while a player with no addons can pull the same DPS as one with addons, they are not likely to perform as well in an actual raid environment.

An example to clarify: Lets say you have two players that are of equal skill levels, one that uses addons and one that does not and both are accustomed to their respective UI setup; for all other purposes you can consider them to be the same person. If you have both players attack a training dummy (with a big enough sample to rule out RNG, obviously) you would see that both players pulll roughly the same DPS, given that they are both very skilled and have sufficient practice with their UI setup. The difference is that the player who is not using addons has to devote a significantly larger portion of his active attention span to maintain that DPS, so as soon as you start introducing several other important things to pay attention to (so let's say you repeat the exercise, but this time have the players maintain a conversation while doing it) you'll see that the player that does not have addons performance decreases at a faster rate. As they have to devote such a significant amount of attention to their rotation, they are forced to either ignore the other challenges presented to them to some degree or let their DPS suffer.

This is why addons are important. Yes they offer almost exclusively convenience, but in a combat situation where you have a limited attention span, convenience of rotation directly translates to an increase in free attention span that you can allocate to other tasks without causing your DPS to suffer. Of course I have no proof of this, but I imagine this is the fundamental misunderstanding of players who do not think addons are valuable.